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Thursday, September 12, 2019

A buddy of mine has a step-daughter who works three or four 12-hour shifts each week as a

clerk in a hospital emergency room. She’s a single mom with three kids, all still at home, all still outgrowing their shoes every other week, and all seemingly capable of eating Walmart’s entire grocery section in a single sitting. She took the job in part because it paid a couple of bucks an hour more than her previous job and because she liked the idea of helping people who were sick or hurting.

Everything started off great. She was energetic about her work and enjoyed serving the patients and the hospital staff. A month or so into it, though, her supervisor called her in and said they had made a mistake on her pay scale. She was going to have to take a cut, but, thanks to the administration’s amazing benevolence, she wouldn’t have to pay back anything from the checks she’d already cashed.

She thought about fighting the decision, but she really needed the job. She felt trapped: stay quiet and take less money or speak out, risk getting fired and possibly end up with nothing. She couldn’t afford nothing so she stayed quiet. Now she hates her job, doesn’t trust her supervisor, and dreads going to work.

The hard, cold reality is that hundreds of thousands of people don’t love what they do. They might be clerks in an emergency room, CEOs in a corporate office, or managers on a factory line, but they find no joy or fulfillment in the efforts that produce their paychecks. For them, work sucks.

What to do?

I don’t have a can’t-miss, silver-bullet solution. But I do believe that everyone can and should do what they love in the service of people who love what they do. It’s highly aspirational, I know, but why settle for less? If, however, you find yourself in a my-work-sucks situation—or if you are counseling someone in that situation—here are a few tips for dealing with the dilemma.

Don’t give up. We’re told from an early age that we should do what makes us happy, but happiness is circumstantial. Sometimes work is hard, even if you love what you do, and sometimes we simply have to adult our way through the tough times. Typically, we learn from those tough times, grow from them, and emerge better in almost every respect. So don’t start with the assumption that you’re in the wrong place and have to leave. That could be true, but don’t operate with that assumption or it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Remember how you got there. What were the events, jobs, projects, and other experiences that led you to your current role? I recommend that people literally draw a map on a piece of paper with “I Am Here” in the middle of the page. Above that, write down the milestone events of your career, good and not so good, and then connect those dots with a line. Now answer these questions: Why did I take this job/start this company/enlist in this program? Are the ideals that I started with still in place today? If not, how can I bring them back to life?

Inventory your work/job/career. The bottom of the page represents today. Use it to write a list of everything you can think of that’s related to your work—every task, project, role, responsibility, colleague, supervisor, employee, customer, client, underlying value, etc. Then circle the aspects you enjoy and draw a square around the ones you don’t.

Plant a gratitude tree. What are the things on that list that truly resonate with you? What do you love doing? What people do you really care about? What values do you see that you strive to live by? What things make coming to work worthwhile? Use a highlighter to mark those things on your list. Find anything and everything about your work that you do love, or even just like, and make note of it.

Spend time in that tree. Review those highlights daily, ideally in the morning or before your work begins, and allow yourself to feel genuine gratitude. That one simple, reflective practice can help stoke or re-kindle a love for the work you do.

In some cases, things will change and you’ll realize you actually love what you do and where you work more than you thought you did. In fact, your change in attitude and commitment will likely be part of the reason things improve, not just for you but for everyone around you.

In some cases, of course, the job or the culture or both simply aren’t worth the stress and anxiety that come with them. You can do your part, but you can’t fake a love for the work and you can’t force other people to change. You can love them and influence them, but you can’t force them to change. The tips might provide a stop-gap solution to help you survive a few weeks or months with more joy and satisfaction, but the ultimate solution might be to leave. That takes courage, because the next place you land won’t be perfect, either. The goal isn’t to find a job with no problems or challenges, but to do something you love so much that you are willing to sacrifice and even suffer when necessary. That job is out there. Find it and fill it with love.

Steve Farber is president of Extreme Leadership Inc., an acclaimed speaker, bestselling

author, and consultant. His new book LOVE IS JUST DAMN GOOD BUSINESS (McGraw-Hill, Sept. 6, 2019) follows The Radical Leap, a bestseller cited among The 100 Best Business Books of All Time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten; The Radical Edge and Greater Than Yourself. He and his family live in San Diego.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Investing in your people
should be the end game for you as a leader. They come to the workplace every
day and invest their significant gifts and talents in an effort to help you and
your organization reach an agree upon goal. Their success is your success.

So, it makes sense that
we as leaders would want to create a success plan for our people. But first, we
have to define success. And that can be a moving target.

A success plan is much
more than an annual performance review. Though they are sometimes lumped
into the same category they are quite different. Annual performance reviews
focus only on what’s born out of hard skills and tend to boil your people down
to metrics around what they’ve done for your company. The general goal of these
meetings is to determine a number that your company thinks your employee is
worth. This (not so subtly) communicates that their value is based only on how
much they can do for the company.

What Is a Success Plan?

I tried the typical
annual performance review in my company for several years, and it left both me
and my employees feeling unfulfilled. In those meetings everyone was primarily
concerned with their compensation, which is to be expected. Many were not
interested in having a meaningful conversation about their passions and goals
at work, let alone their passions and goals outside of work.

It became clear that I
needed to revisit these get-togethers and figure out a different agenda, one
that would serve the company and the team member. I realized that if these
great people who were bringing their bests selves to my company every day were
having to ask for my time and space to talk about their fulfillment, then I
probably wasn’t doing it right. Why should they have to wait for their next
performance review to have a dialogue with me about their dreams, their success
plans, or their jobs?

When I realized that a
change was needed, I started at the beginning. I redefined the whole notion of
a success plan. Here’s my new definition: A success plan is dedicated space
to focus on the success of your people, both personally and professionally, to
move your employee to fulfillment. The success plan focuses on fulfillment
through their soft skills and requires you as the leader to practice more
intentionality and engagement on who they are personally, not just
professionally. It’s a daily engagement toward ultimate fulfillment. Not
that I said daily and not annually. Dialogue can and should happen anytime. Not
just when I schedule it.

To be successful at
success planning you have to know the full person. You have to know what makes
them tick and what might influence their idea of success. This is where the
pursuit happens. This is where you show your people their value beyond what
they bring to work. Pursue your people and do it on purpose. Yes, it takes a
great deal of time and effort to pull this off. But the benefits for everyone
involved-the company, the employee and yourself- are worth it.

Meaningful Investment

Creating a personalized
success plan for each of your employees requires that you really
understand your people. You have to understand how they define success
personally and professionally. This takes time and sustained effort; you can’t
rush through it.

Throwing pizza parties
and happy hours doesn’t necessarily create these opportunities for meaningful
investment and relationship building. If you care about your people and serving
them toward fulfillment, be genuine and authentic in your pursuit. Talk to them
about their families and home lives. Ask them how they spend their free time
and what their interests are. Find out what really motivates them and how they
define what’s commonly known as work-life balance.

In my organization, we
no longer use the term ‘work-life balance’. Emphasizing work-life as a balance
is a win-lose proposition. So, we use the phrase work-life integration.
This is meant to create more alignment between our personal and professional
lives. In a work-life balance model, something gets cheated; it communicates
that you need to be all things to all people at all times, which is impossible.
But by working toward work-life integration, the gap between the two is
bridged and we communicate that the two should complement each other instead of
competing.

Figure these things out
on an individual basis for each person in your organization and you will find
that success becomes clear. It will be different for each person, but you can
help them attain it, whatever it looks like. In exploring your people’s
definitions of work-life integration, you’ll find some people who want more
structure at work and others who would prefer to have more flexibility. Neither
one is wrong—it’s just who they are.

You can do all this
through informal conversations that can and should happen anytime that they are
needed.

Chris Meroff has spent more than 25 years
supporting leaders in education at both the campus and district levels. Through
his work in 17 states and across thousands of school districts, he’s seen
firsthand the frustration administrators feel when their efforts don’t produce
the alignment they desire. He’s made a career of testing new leadership ideas
to see what works—and what doesn’t—in service-oriented leadership. His
business, Alignment Leadership Consulting, exists to teach leaders how they can
boldly pursue a workplace culture that prioritizes employee fulfillment. You
can learn more at www.AlignLeadThrive.com .